Here’s why we’ve launched a new experiment: ComcastWA, an app for smartphones.
Comcast employees are part of a vibrant company that people talk about. Through the Internet, commentary and news about Comcast flies around the world in seconds. The speed of communication is a challenge for any company these days if the company wants its employees informed. Imagine this conversation between two people, one who works for Comcast, and the other who doesn’t:
“Yes, I work for Comcast.”
“Gosh, I just saw on Twitter that your company is introducing a new product, a television that plays inside your brain. You must be very proud.”
“Oh, um … did that get announced?”
OK, we made up the part about the TV inside your brain. But the rest of the scenario is real. And it’s not pleasant. You don’t want an employee surprised about news about their very own company. So how do you inform employees without sending them emails or blast phone messages throughout the day? In the old days, you just published memos and newsletters to share news with employees. Today’s newsletters are much more interactive and timely. The newsletter, like the blog, are a foundation of the information chain. But newsletters generally can’t inform you about something that a newspaper announced on Twitter five minutes ago.
That’s why we created an app we’re testing that would allow an employee to quickly, on their smartphone, access news about the company. In the ‘categories’ section, we have feeds to company news through our company’s national Comcast Voices blog and our company news release site. And we have a feed from this blog, where we try to capture important news for the Washington market. In the ‘social’ section, we have our Twitter feed, @ComcastWA. If a social media site or newspaper or whatever announces an important story about Comcast, we share the link via Twitter. There will be a connection to our state market’s Facebook page. And so employees can know instantly who we support in the community, we also have links to the videos we produce here locally: public service announcements, Comcast Neighborhoods and Comcast Newsmakers.
Our hope is that the ComcastWA app is one more tool employees can use to keep track of company news. This is no substitute for reading all the news that’s out there, but there’s only so many seconds in the day. We’re hoping our app helps employees. We will be looking forward to their feedback and revise the app accordingly.
By the way, we can’t say enough nice things about the folks at GENWI who really did the work on these apps. If you need an app, they’re a great bunch of people and very responsive.
We’re assuming that mostly employees are going to be interested in Washington-specific Comcast news. But of course, anyone can download the ComcastWA app. The ComcastWA app is available in both Android and iPhone flavors. Search for ComcastWA in your market, use the QR code above, or visit our app distribution home on iSites.
